Word: mendelianism
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...traits seemed to many the key that would unlock the mysteries of human heredity. In the U.S., biologist Charles Davenport (1866-1944) established, with the help of a $10 million endowment from the Carnegie Institution, a center for research in human evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. A strict Mendelian, Davenport believed so-called single-unit genes determined such traits as alcoholism and feeblemindedness. The way to eradicate such failings in the human stock, he argued, was to prevent their carriers from reproducing. He voiced the hope that "human matings could be placed upon the same high plane as that...
Much of this public fervor looks comically ill informed in hindsight. In the U.S. and Britain, fairs and exhibitions regularly featured exhibits illustrating Mendelian laws of inheritance, often in the form of black-and-white guinea pigs stuffed and mounted to demonstrate the heritability of fur color. Kevles quotes from a chart accompanying such a display: "Unfit human traits such as feeblemindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, alcoholism, pauperism and many others run in families and are inherited in exactly the same way as color in guinea pigs...
...book, be forewarned, is not a layman's treatise on the mechanisms of natural selection. Dennett plunges right into the philosophical implications of evolution without giving a thorough explanation of Mendelian genetics or the process of DNA replication, so that the biology novice will no doubt feel a bit swamped from the beginning. Unfortunately, the situation does not improve as Dennett rockets through literally dozens of debates and subtopics within Darwinism. The sheer breadth of the book makes it better suited for someone already acquainted with the state of current evolutionary biology...
...currently popular genetic model of mental disorder has much hearsay but little scientific evidence to support it. Never has any identifiable inheritance pattern--certainly not a straightforward, classical (Mendelian) one--been documented for any disorder or behavioral trait, including manic-depressive illness (MDI); every much-ballyhooed claim for "genetic markers" of MDI has been quietly retracted as a result of further unbiased scientific study. A renowned geneticist, Harvard's Evan Balaban, terms "behavioral genetics" research a "hierarchy of worthlessness...
Victor McKusick, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University, was in the game much earlier. He has been cataloging genes since 1959, compiling findings in his regularly updated publication, Mendelian Inheritance in Man. In August 1987 he introduced an electronic version that scientists around the world can tap into by computer. At the end of December it contained information on all the 4,550 genes identified to date. Says McKusick: "That's an impressive figure, but we still have a long way to go." Several other libraries of genetic information are already functioning, among them GenBank at the Los Alamos National...